i deleted the piece of geometry with the most vertices and it dramatically sped things up
i think the trick is (obviously) to minimize the gemometry of what is in the view to only what is seen by the camera, no shortcuts, must pare the scene down to the bare essentials
this seems to be the best workaround, err workflow
could not find a pattern yet, but sometimes max/vray just hangs at transforming vertices, instead of finishing this stage in less than a second. have to crash max if it hangs.
happens 1 out of 99 renders or so. might be geometry related, but it’s not a steady bug here. could it be a network jam so xref’s can’t be read properly?
no big trouble as it happens only once in a while.